Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (14 page)

“I shall never harm you again. I swear I shall end myself before I do.”

“Stop it,” said Lila, as smartly as a slap to the face. “You will not leave me alone and everliving in this world, like a tormented ghost. If I am to haunt Geadhain, it shall be with you. We shall endure whatever this storm is. The only promise you need to make is that you will return to me. No matter how broken, how bloodied, or how lost. You will return to me.”

“I swear.”

Never had he treasured the day he had learned of his bloodmate more than this moment. The journey that he had taken to find her, the arduous climb through the wildest deeps of the world, reminded him of what he had yet to say.

“What I would ask is that if my return is
hindered
, if there are walls to surmount before I reach you again, you must find the bravest souls in this age and set them upon a quest. A most dangerous journey. Find men of courage, strength, and cunning, for all such traits are needed where they will tread.”

Most dangerous journey
, she thought, knowing
where
but unable to accept it. Her king had undertaken a similar quest once, and it had come close to claiming his immortal life. He whispered what she feared.

“Those charged by your hand must seek counsel with the only three known creatures in this world older than me. From the women who know the names of trees that I do not, for they watched those first saplings grow. They surely understand the dangers we face. The oldest and wisest on Geadhain…you know of whom I speak.”

“I do.”

Lila’s soul was turbulent. It circled his ribs like an angry bird. He tried to calm it. “A last resort, is all, if I do not return as soon as we might hope. I do not believe there is a mystery in Geadhain toward which the Sisters Three have not tended a hand, eye, or ear. They will know the true nature of our clouded enemy.”

Magnus lifted Lila’s chin and his emerald gaze bore into her. He said, “I was once lost and seeking…restless with all that I had done…weary of the achievements of mortalkind. Of the empire I raised, or the lovers I took to
my bed. None of it satisfied me. I believe Brutus felt that restlessness, too, and it can become like an unfed monster. Time and distance did not heal it, for we can never be apart. Not until now, at least. How can either of us be a man with nothing that is truly our own? I wanted that, Lila, my Spring, my golden, glorious Spring. I took the journey; I found the myth that was not myself. I asked the question, and you were the answer. Without the Sisters’ hand, without your face reflected in the witch water of that one with the mournful stare, I would not be here. I would not have found what made me a man.”

He is there again, in the crystal-studded cavern that bleeds unearthly light. Three figures are about him: one large, one medium, and one child-sized. They have not told him their names. They do not feel he needs to know them, yet he knows who they are. The eldest one found him in the woods, slung him up like a bag of turnips, and through blinking and inky memories—brambles, bobbing up rocks—he ended up in this cavern. And he sleeps, lightly, while they dress his wounds and sing old songs, like the ones he and his brother made up while pretending to be animals
.

It is a wonder that he is alive. Although he does not recall much of the sleepless, deadly trials that brought him here. He has flashes of hunting animals with spear and wit; as magik, even his great magik, works as it wants in Alabion, which is often not at all. He remembers the whispering trees that would lead him astray, off cliffs or into thornbushes, or try to lure his feet into serpents’ holes. He remembers running, panting, and shivering in trees as grotesque, shaggy terrors sniffed for him below. He remembers hiding from his brother, too, lying about his whereabouts and concealing his intents. For this is his journey, his alone. It is more difficult than the Untamed’s lethal wilds. It is the fight against the fire-beast within that cannot live without him
.

I want to live without him. I want to be myself
.

Onward the chant drives him, bloody-kneed and ragged, until he falls
.

Now he is here, with the three women who hum with magik, even though he does not. When he is good enough to stand and not much better, he is hauled up and brought to look into a pool. All or one of them speak; he cannot say. But voices echo in the chamber
.

“Outside these woods, you are a king. Within, all truths are bare, and we see the boy in the skin of a man. You seek what will fill your emptiness. What
you will rule as yours and yours alone. All life is a circle, and you have come so far only to return to where you left. A flower, a golden flower in the desert. Show him, sister. Show him what he seeks.”

In the water, a vision ripples forth, conjured by the sad-faced sister’s hand. He sees her, this golden flower, wrapped in the sheets of an Arhad bride. Only her eyes are revealed, which are all that is needed. For the iron in them, the determination to be more than her fate, is as striking as his pale countenance that shimmers alongside her reflection
.

“A queen. A love to last one thousand years before it is tested. Go, boy. Go and play at being a man, until that happiness must end,” command the Sisters
.

Lila allowed Magnus to float back to her, knowing that he was off in a memory. She saw wisps of it in her head—glimpses of grand, haggard woods, yellow-eyed beasts, and three eerie women in a glowing hollow.

“I shall arrange for this quest, should you”—she hung on the words until spitting them out—“be delayed in your return.”

“Good,” he said.

A thick silence hung between them, but they did not disengage from each other. They relished their contact. She, in his smooth strength, as if she hugged pliant marble; and he, in her lemony perfume and the tickling of her hair against his cheek.

“I must soon prepare our soldiers. Would you lie with me awhile? Nothing more than our bodies entwined on the bed. Nothing more than my arms around you, if you trust them.”

“I do,” she replied.

They wandered over to the bed and came to rest. Forehead to forehead, they lay, with Magnus’s arms and legs slid between hers, and he murmured his love to her in words or with bursts of his winter. Through that embrace, as they passed passion into the other, lovemaking without the crudeness of their bodies, she pardoned her king for a crime that was not ultimately his. As he left the bed, kissing her upon the shoulder, she was so calm and sleepy that she didn’t reach out to him when she should have. For without any magik, but merely in her heart, she knew that this was the last she was to see of her bloodmate, her immortal and beautiful king, for a long, long time.

V

THE MOUSE

I

I
f Eod was known as the jeweled crown of the desert, then Menos was a black crown of iron forged from the chains of a slave. Where one was built of white stone, clean magik, and honest work, the other was a grim metropolis of dark metal towers that stabbed at a polluted sky as if in hatred of its existence. A city whose foundations were smudged in filth and steeped in the blood of forced labor. Look closer and the handprints of slaves could be seen on the poured stone of Menos’s gray roads, all slippery with oil or alchemical effluences that ran in rainbow trails into rusty grates. Mirthless folk glanced up to the overcast clouds, hoping that it would not rain today. For in Menos, the sky was filled with technomagikal contamination, and when it wept, it burned enough to give one a case of
stinkeye
, as the locals called it—an unfortunate malady that made the eyes weep with cheesy encrustations. Those not walking rode the streets in carriages, with metal-and-meat horses that carried the faint herb-and-formaldehyde waft of preserved flesh. Beasts animated and repurposed from dead parts were these; enhanced with plating, pistoned legs, and nictitating eyes so that they could navigate farther and faster than a natural of their species. Jealously, the masters in these coaches sneered out at the rows of steepled, iron-gated manses, and with disdain
upon the dilapidated, filthy quarters of the city—some of these homes no better than shanties piled alongside and atop one another. Scarce was the smile that was seen on the cheeks of a Menosian, for it was a society that valued mind and power over empathy and weakness. It was a hierarchy of predators, where the weak were food for the strong.

Spare the rod, sell the child
, was the quintessential Menosian proverb. How true that adage rang in the markets of Menos, where anything could be bought and sold, from death to life to sin. Under a girded metal wall that encircled the city—the Iron Wall
—
commerce flourished in a raucous marketplace. Here abounded a sea of black tents, clanging metal smithies, and magikal workshops that looked like chapels with tin chimneys—
ateliers
, the locals called them. But at these chapels, a man would not pray to the lost spirits of the land; rather, he would procure elixirs to poison, confuse, or incapacitate. Were the tools of treachery not of one’s interest, Menos’s greatest trade was on display upon bloody stages, where chained folk shivered before barking crowds; or in even less savory arcades deep under the streets, where the nameless tribesmen stolen from their homes were sold in beaten, naked herds.

II

Mouse didn’t care for the Undercomb, the second city under Menos. It wasn’t the sweat-thick, pissy air that repelled her, however, or the cringing sobs of mongrels trapped in barred pens, or the masters shouting bids over one another, or the constant cracking of whips, or even the porridge of blood and fecal matter that ran down troughs along the cell-lined hallways. Mouse simply pinched her nose as she passed. In truth, these atrocities were nothing to her. She had known the kiss of a lash and the thrust of a knife to places meant to bear children. She had crawled from the indentureship of a Pleasure Maiden (what a wholesome name for such a despicable torment, she thought). These wretches could break free of their fates, too—if they were lucky, vicious, and determined enough.

She was as hard as a dagger, just as warm in bed, and twice as deadly. But that was the means to survival in Menos. You were strong or you were used
and shortly dead. She would never be used again. She wasn’t opposed to taking
paid
instruction, however. Her shadowy overseers were kind and absent, and she was essentially the freest that any lower creature of Menos could dream of being. And she had her measure of power, for she assisted in the dispensing of information—a currency of its own in Menos, and as valuable as flesh. She was a runner in the shadows, an ear to heed, a mouth to whisper: a
Voice
, as her kind were known. She was an agent of the Watchers—the curators of all secrets, lies, and half-truths in the civilized lands. For the most part, being a string to the puppet masters of Geadhain was a satisfying vocation. The only regrettable part was that she did not choose her clients, or the messages she conveyed. Which brought her to the Flesh Markets this afternoon, for a visit to a man more terrible than any of the surrounding atrocities. She had an appointment with the Broker.

While the Iron sages were the masters of Menos, the Broker was the master of the realms beneath them. He was the keeper of the trades in which they were too haughty to dirty their hands. The choicest slaves—those who spoke, performed the best coitus, and looked the most desirable—were handpicked by the Broker and sent to the pleasure houses above. Trafficking, assassination, witchroot peddling, whoremongering, blood sports, and every other criminal pursuit was at one point acknowledged or approved by the Broker. The Iron sages knew that it was better to have these unpleasant elements united, contained, and controlled than to leave such crimes unregulated—and possibly used against them. Besides, as an Iron sage, it was easier to know who among the Council of the Wise was plotting to kill you if you all visited the same man, the same
Broker
, to arrange for your assassinations.

That day, Mouse carried a message for the Broker from one who did not want a direct meeting—possibly a member of the Council of the Wise. Although she was a woman who feared next to nothing, the Broker was the exception. She had encountered him once, when she was still an owned woman in a house of pleasure, and the impression that the Broker left did not fade.